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Cities of Light, Cities of Dread: The European Metropolis and the Conflicts of Modernity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2008

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Review Articles
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

1 There are, unsurprisingly, as many definitions of modernity as theorists who have sought to define it. Although only a partial definition, Therborn's description of modernity as an ‘epoch turned to the future’ is a helpful start and it underscores a distinction between traditional and modern societies that we might call historical non-boundedness. See Therborn, Göran, European Modernity and Beyond. The Trajectory of European Societies 1945–2000 (London: Sage, 1995), 4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Baudelaire stressed the phenomenological aspect of modernity, arguing that it represented ‘the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is the one half of art, the other being the external and immutable’. Cited in Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 10.Google Scholar

2 Anthony Giddens argues that the high levels of integration necessary to the formation of modern societies depended on the emergence of the nineteenth-century nation-state which once and for all broke the thrall of the local community as the site of primary political and economic power. See Anthony Giddens, ‘Living in a Post-traditional Society’, in Beck, Ulrich, Giddens, Ulrich, Lash, Scott, Reflexive Modernization. Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), 92–3.Google Scholar

3 Brancusi, it is claimed, when asked his nationality replied, ‘Terrestrial, human, white’, and declared that ‘In art there are no foreigners’. Cited in Cronin, , Paris, City of Light, 94.Google Scholar

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13 Although curiously not by Porter in his otherwise exhaustive account of popular London pastimes.

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